AI-powered search engine Perplexity is venturing into e-commerce. On Monday, the company debuted a new shopping feature for its paid customers in the U.S. which offers shopping recommendations within Perplexity’s search results as well as the ability to place an order without going to a retailer’s website.
With the move, Perplexity is taking on Google and Amazon, intending to capture a portion of shopping search results.
For shopping-related search queries, the tool presents users with visual cards that have details of the product, pricing, and seller info, a short description, and the pros and cons of the item in question. Users can click or tap on the card to read more information, including reviews and detailed key features.
Consumers can also store their address and credit card details in Perplexity for easy checkout. The company says it calculates taxes for your address, so you can purchase an item with one click. The company said Pro subscribers will get free shipping for items purchased through its one-click checkout system. For now, the search engine’s recommendations are “unbiased” as there are no sponsored slots, Perplexity notes.
The new search experience is powered by integrations with sellers’ sites, including those on Shopify. The latter unlocks information on all sellers using Shopify who are shipping items in the U.S.
The feature also provides a way for users to search by adding a photo of an item that they want along with their query. This is similar to Google which has also offered various iterations of a product that allows you to combine images and text in a search box.
Alongside the launch of its shopping tools, Perplexity is introducing a merchant program.
If merchants enroll in this program, they’ll have a better chance of being a recommended product because the company will have more complete information in its index. People can also use a one-click checkout to buy items from the company’s merchant partners, the company said.
Merchants will have free API access to power search on their own websites, as well, which could help Perplexity gain market share in this space. The company said it’s not taking an affiliate cut from user purchases at the moment. Plus, it clarified that the shopping feature is separate from its ads product, which was introduced last week.
Apart from Big Tech, startups like Daydream, Deft, and Remark have also raised millions of dollars from venture capitalists to build AI-powered shopping searches.
Amazon debuted AI-powered assistant Rufus earlier this year in the U.S. and expanded to other countries late last month. After its Prime Day sales event in July, the company noted that Rufus helped “millions” of customers find the right items. Google also primed its Shopping tab with AI in October for better search results.
With the onset of large language models, companies working in the e-commerce industry have realized that there is an opportunity to suggest better options as these models can parse user queries and match items from the catalog using organized and unorganized data.
The promise of this new wave of search is that e-commerce search has been bad for years, but now you can write long sentences to describe an item you need, and AI will do the work for you.
These companies are also betting on the fact that AI will help you find an item quickly, and you won’t need to spend a lot of time looking for something. But this premise comes with an implicit caveat: You should trust the limited search results that AI tools serve you. To build trust, the companies providing these tools will have to make sure to remove implicit bias and preferential treatment before regulators intervene.
